Rafe Martin Interview

Rafe Martin is an internationally known storyteller and award-winning author whose work has been featured in Time, Newsweek and USA Today. Rafe has appeared in thousands of schools, libraries, festivals, and conferences in nearly every state-including Alaska and Hawaii-and as far away as Japan. He is a recipient of the prestigious Empire State Award, for the body of his work, and is also a fully ordained lay Zen practitioner.

Transcript

SZ: How did you come to Zen practice?

RM: Painfully, having reached the end of the road I was on, back in 1970. I’d read the Three Pillars and then actually met Kapleau Roshi several times. Each time we met at a talk or luncheon he’d say to my wife and myself, “You should come to Rochester.” In 1970 we finally did just that. Our son was eight weeks old then so we had another being totally dependent on us, and that really shook us. We felt the time had come to stop futzing around and get on with the real work.

SZ: I’d love to hear you tell us about Kapleau-roshi. Most people know him as that guy who wrote The Three Pillars of Zen. But who was he?

He was the court reporter at the Nurenberg War Trials and the Tokyo trials — taking down the testimony of that human horror and suffering is what precipitated him towards Zen! The article goes into who he was in depth. It was written for Buddhadharma shortly after his death.

SZ: I also don’t get to ask this question of teachers as often as I’d like. I’m curious about the Diamond Sangha, who you currently have affiliation with through your work with several of their teachers. How exactly does the teaching authorization process work within Diamond Sangha? It seems to be, and correct me if I’m wrong, intentionally distancing itself from the mythology that surrounds that catchphrase “dharma transmission.”

RM: Hmm. Not sure what you mean Adam. They are very clear on “dharma transmission.” What they do NOT do is ordination. (And ordination does not, of course, necessarily imply anything about teaching.) Typically. But as my teacher, Danan HenryRoshi, was ordained and sanctioned to teach by Kapleau Roshi back in the ’80s, then went on to train with AitkenRoshi and receive teaching permission from him, he passes on ordination — in both initiatory and complete forms. The complete form he offers is the same as priest or monk but is as a lay practioner. (He may have done one priestly ordination.) The only difference lies in specifics of the Vows. You can see some of mine in the final section of my new book — Endless Path: Awakening Within the Buddhist Imagination.

SZ: How important is writing to you and why?

RM: It is a Path, a primary way that my imagination works to explore, access, and also teach. How important is that? I’ve spent some times not writing. But there always comes the time when I have to start again. Because I miss it. The imagination remains central to my sense of life and of practice. It is very old territory—ancient, yet always new. I think Gary Snyder once wrote or said something like, “We have imagination because we’d be so much less without it.” My apologies to Gary if it wasn’t him, and if I didn’t get it right. But that’s how I recall it.

SZ: What does mythology have to say to us as human beings? Why are the stories expressed so important?

RM: It’s not simply the content of stories that’s important. It’s that stories in words – spoken or written – get us to access our minds – to visualize, internalize, and integrate into our natures what might otherwise remain distant, abstract, and conceptual. In a story the dharma (which is aboriginal, Paleolithic, not necessarily owned by Buddhism at all) gets to live, breathe, bleed, flex its muscles and be embodied – in us. It’s experiential not dogmatic. And that is both a great relief and a real blessing.

SZ: Do you find that children are able to understand the meaning of most of your works, even those which may not be explicitly intended for them?

RM: Yes. Children understand a lot more than we may think they do – or we may want them to. I can point out to children that when a story is told I’m just making sounds on the air – that that’s all that words are. But that their minds actually create the characters, scenes, and events of the stories. Then I say, “But if you’re head is cut open, none of those pictures are there. Inside your skull is bone, blood, and if you’re lucky – brains. But no pictures. So where is the imagination? Where is the mind?” And kids will get it – that the mind cannot be found and that every day we live in dimensions that are ungraspable. In fact that’s where we are all the time. They get that stories aren’t concepts but living things of sorrow and joy, courage, and cowardice, compassion and selfishness. They get that stories are the koans of the world. Good for them!!

SZ: It’s often said that there is a fine line between true realization and madness. Is that overstating the case, or is that more or less accurate? Why?

RM: It seems overstated. Still, if Shakyamuni is right and our real nature is truly Buddha, fully endowed with wisdom and compassion, then the world and all people including us, and the way we all act is actually crazy and delusive most of the time. If the world and its ways are right, and an internal, separated, self-centered ego is the real nature of our reality then Shakyamuni was crazy and practice just a nice dream. As the old song says, “Which side are you on?” You can break your heart or crack or skull on this any old time you choose. Practicing in the midst of this is where we all live.

SZ: If someone asked me what the goal of my Zen practice is, I’d probably answer that my goal is receiving everything just as it is. How would you answer that question of why we’re doing what we do?

RM: Hmmm. Receiving implies someone there receiving, observing, even waiting to receive, however calmly and harmoniously. That seems somewhat self-limiting. The goal of practice, if we want to call it that, as far as I can see, is to embody the Way and realize the Bodhisattva Vow to save all beings. But to do that, we have to work on ourselves. Ceaselessly. The goal comes down to this breath, this thought, letting go of this anger, reaching out to this friend. Not being there – is being Here. Dropping the self and being confirmed by the 10,000 things remains the foundation of character development and of entering the Way — to somewhat misquote both Yamada Roshi and Zen Master Dogen in one fell swoop. (But hopefully not to twist or defile them.)

SZ: Questioning was central to the Buddha’s enlightenment, to the hwadu and koan traditions, and therefore seems to be a real prerequisite for what we might call awakening. Does it matter what the questions are? Where are good questions drawn from?

RM: It matters very much what questions we ask. If we don’t ask the right ones, questioning can become little more than an exercise in providing ourselves with answers, rather than blowing all answers out of the water (temporarily) and simply realizing what’s been here from the start. Good questions may not be so much drawn from anything as ones that grip us; that function to aim us toward what Dogen called, “thinking not-thinking,” or towards the Eternal Present, or to Mind itself rather than the mind. I’ve heard that some time back, early on, Japanese teachers tried for a while to create new Japanese koans. In the end they returned to the old cases. Those old Chinese koan cases it seems have a kind of gripping power, are so archetypal in their Dharma eye, that they’ve never been surpassed. Even Hakuin’s “Sound of A Single Hand,” has old Chinese antecedents. Though I know some contemporary Westerners working with koan lineage teachers who have found “What, or Who, is G-d?” helpful in opening them to traditional koan work. “Who is hearing?” too, has been used successfully. But all such questioning is really to be worked on with a teacher.

SZ: Rafe, thanks so much for sitting down with us today. In closing, what book(s) would you recommend to those interested in learning a bit more about Zen and its practice?

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Established in 2009 as a grassroots initiative, Sweeping Zen is a digital archive of information on Zen Buddhism. Featuring in-depth interviews, an extensive database of biographies, news, articles, podcasts, teacher blogs, events, directories and more, this site is dedicated to offering the public a range of views in the sphere of Zen Buddhist thought. We are also endeavoring to continue creating lineage charts for all Western Zen lines, doing our own small part in advancing historical documentation on this fabulous import of an ancient tradition. Come on in with a tea or coffee. You're always bound to find something new.

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About Sweeping Zen

Established in 2009 as a grassroots initiative, Sweeping Zen is a digital archive of information on Zen Buddhism. Featuring in-depth interviews, an extensive database of biographies, news, articles, podcasts, teacher blogs, events, directories and more, this site is dedicated to offering the public a range of views in the sphere of Zen Buddhist thought. We are also endeavoring to continue creating lineage charts for all Western Zen lines, doing our own small part in advancing historical documentation on this fabulous import of an ancient tradition. Come on in with a tea or coffee. You're always bound to find something new.

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